Global Terrorism News, Opinions and Events

May 22, 2013

The federal government has given the job of compiling statistics used by the State Department to analyze trends in global terrorism to an academic group, a move that may complicate accurate unclassified assessments of patterns of terrorist activity for years to come. As President Barack Obama prepares to deliver a major speech on counterterrorism this week and the State Department readies its annual terrorism report for release at the end of the month, officials said Tuesday that the switch also removes federal accountability for the numbers, something that could make them less reliable in the eyes of some.

May 21, 2013

The author of best-sellers about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida is working on a book about terrorists in the US. Crown Publishers announced Monday that CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen has a deal for a definitive book on homegrown terrorism.

May 21, 2013

Pakistan Friday called for sharper focus on dialogue and development in terrorist-hit areas, while maintaining military pressure as part of efforts to eliminate the scourge of terrorism. “When terrorists defy the writ of the state, kill civilians, spread terror, they have to be stopped; stopped by the use of force; stopped militarily,” Ambassador Masood Khan told more than 100 delegates attending a Pakistan-sponsored seminar at U.N. Headquarters in New York. “There is absolutely no doubt about that,” the Pakistani envoy said of using military means against terrorists. “But,” he added, “by killing the terrorists, we do not defeat terrorism. To eliminate terrorism, we have to go into the causes and deconstruct the mindset that launches them into terrorism.”

May 21, 2013

In what’s being billed by the White House as a major national security speech, President Obama this week will explain his policies dealing with counterterrorism, the use of drone aircraft, Al Qaeda, and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “He will review the state of the threats we face, particularly as the Al Qaeda core has weakened but new dangers have emerged,” a White House official told reporters, according to the Washington Post. “He will discuss the policy and legal framework under which we take action against terrorist threats, including the use of drones. And he will review our detention policy and efforts to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.”

May 21, 2013

An Uzbekistan national pleaded not guilty and said little during his first court appearance Friday on U.S. charges that he gave support, cash and other resources to help a recognized terrorist group in his home country plan a terrorist attack there. Fazliddin Kurbanov, 30, was arrested Thursday. Prosecutors have said little about the details of their investigation. He was charged after an extensive investigation into his activities late last year and this year.

May 23, 2013

THE killing of a man in broad daylight is thought to be the first terrorist attack on British streets since the 2005 London bombings. A total of 52 people were killed that day by four suicide bombers on London's transport network. Since then, there have been a number of other plots, the first coming just two weeks after July 7, when another group of four bombers attempted to replicate the earlier attack but failed.

May 22, 2013

A man has died and two are injured after police responded to a reported machete attack in south-east London. The government is reported to be treating the assault as a suspected terrorist incident and the prime minister said it was "truly shocking".

May 8, 2013

Failure to properly support the rebuilding of Somalia will lead to "terrorism and mass migration", David Cameron will warn, as the international community gathers in London to discuss the country. Almost 50 governments are expected to attend the meeting – which the Prime Minister is co-hosting with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud – alongside the IMF, World Bank and other global bodies.

May 8, 2013

The Norwegian government has proposed extending the maximum prison sentence for terrorism to 30 years, in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik’s attacks last year that killed 77 people. In its proposals to Parliament on Tuesday, the government also put forward a motion to criminalize participation in terrorist organizations, but said courts should define such groups.

May 8, 2013

Emotions ran high as Germany's biggest terrorism trial in decades got underway Monday in Munich. The hearing is on the murders of 10 people who were the victims of a nearly decadelong neo-Nazi terror campaign against the Turkish community there.

April 30, 2013

Remnants of Peru’s Shining Path rebels blew up a telephone tower in an isolated, coca-growing region in southeastern Peru, adding to a number of similar attacks during the past month. Late Thursday, the rebels blew up a ClaroPeru-owned tower in Peru’s Huancavelica region Tayacaja province. Claro is the local operator of Mexican telecommunications company America Movil.

April 10, 2013

The Peruvian Congress should reject a legislative proposal that includes overly broad language to criminalize the denial of terrorist crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. President Ollanta Humala proposed the bill in August 2012. In December, two Congressional commissions – Justice and Human Rights, and Constitution and Rules of Procedure – adopted a modified version, which is pending before Congress. The version before Congress would increase the criminal penalties Humala proposed while somewhat limiting the scope of the charges.

February 10, 2013

In a controversial and highly publicized verdict, the Court of Appeals in Temuco decided to release suspect Emilio Berkhoff on bail Friday. Berkhoff’s case has been of particular interest to the Interior Ministry, as officials suspect he may be an active member of the CAM, a Mapuche resistance group the government characterizes as a terrorist organization.

January 25, 2013

January 7, 2013

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera is meeting with his ministers to determine urgent measures in response to a deadly arson attack in the country’s south. An elderly couple was burned alive in the remote southern region of Araucania on Friday while trying to defend their home. Their family’s vast landholdings had long been targeted by Mapuche Indians who claim ancestral rights over the land. Pinera flew to the scene, deployed hundreds of police agents and announced new security measures including the application of Chile’s tough anti-terrorism law.

May 21, 2013

A Bahraini court sentenced nine people to jail terms ranging between 10 and 15 years on Monday after convicting them of forming a terrorist group, a judicial source said. Cleric Ahmad Al Majid and a second defendant were jailed for 15 years, while a third defendant was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

May 21, 2013

An anti-terrorism police officer and four people were shot dead by gunmen in the southern suburb of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said. The incident occurred at dawn when gunmen broke into the house of the officer in al-Rasheed suburb and shot him dead with his wife and two children, the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

May 12, 2013

Hundreds of Tunisians, including police, human rights activists and political party representatives, protested on Friday against "terrorism" after the government said two wanted jihadist groups had ties with Al-Qaeda. Several hundred protesters gathered outside the national assembly shouting "Tunisia is free, terrorism out!" and waving placards with slogans including: "We support the security forces and the army in the war against terrorism."

May 10, 2013

Terrorism has no religion and it has the same ugly face around the world, King Hamad Bin Eisa Al Khalifa has said. “In Bahrain and in Boston, terrorists used pressure cookers to assemble their homemade bombs, which killed innocent people and injured hundreds,” he said.

May 5, 2013

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made another blistering accusation against the opposition on May 4, arguing that the parties who were against the ongoing peace process had in the past used terrorism and conspired to perpetuate the Kurdish conflict for their own political interest.

May 23, 2013

New Zealand police acted unlawfully and unreasonably during armed raids near a small Maori settlement in 2007, an independent report has said. Police accepted the findings of the Independent Police Conduct Authority report on Wednesday, but said they were targeting military-style camps based in Ruatoki Valley in the remote Urewera mountain range of New Zealand's north island and the operation had to be taken in context.

May 21, 2013

21 years after the central government had declared May 21 as Anti-Terrorism Day, following the assassination of former PM Rajiv Gandhi on this day, the Maharashtra government has finally issued an official circular to observe this day. RTI activist and director of the NGO Athak Seva Sangh, Anil Galgali, told TOI: "I am surprised that the Maharashtra state has finally woken up after 21 long years to observe May 21 as Anti-Terrorism Day. The government circular to this effect was issued on May 16 this year. Why was it not done in the previous years?"

May 17, 2013

AUSTRALIA'S armed forces needs to be protected from any risk of being charged with terrorism, an expert committee has recommended.The committee's review of Australia's counter-terrorism legislation says the present definition of a terrorist act theoretically encompassed Australian forces in authorised military operations abroad. "Such a situation is clearly undesirable," the review tabled in parliament on Tuesday said.

May 14, 2013

Indonesia’s National Police backed the use of deadly force by the department’s anti-terrorism squad Densus 88 in recent raids, explaining that the deaths of seven terrorism suspects was something the police were “forced to do.” Densus 88 conducted raids in five provinces as part of a crackdown on a terrorist cell accused of using the proceeds from armed robberies to fund militant activities in the restive district of Poso, Central Sulawesi. Police arrested 17 alleged terrorists in the stings and killed seven others.

May 12, 2013

Polling has now ended in historic Pakistani elections, the first time since the nation’s 1947 independence in which a popularly elected government has submitted itself to a fresh round of polls. Polling had to be extended into Saturday evening to accommodate technical challenges in the face of a large voter turnout, and violent attacks attributed to the Pakistani Taliban, the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan militant group.

May 22, 2013

Nigeria said Tuesday it would release several suspects held for "terrorist activities," including all women in custody, in what it called a peace gesture to the Islamists it is battling in the north. The announcement came as Nigeria pressed ahead with a nearly week-old offensive against Islamist insurgents in the northeast of Africa's most populous nation, while the Red Cross said at least 2,400 people had fled violence in the region.

May 17, 2013

A declaration of a state of emergency in three northern Nigerian states does nothing to address the root cause of a surge in Islamic terrorism against Christians and others, an expert in Islamism told Baptist Press. Further, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan's May 14 declaration is only a partial state of emergency because local governments in the northeastern states are still in place, said Adeniyi Ojutiku, a native Nigerian Christian and founder of Lift Up Now, a Christian nonprofit outreach to improve living conditions in his homeland.

May 14, 2013

Aaron Yoon, the young Canadian currently serving a two-year prison sentence in Mauritania on terrorism-related charges, faced calls from prosecutors Monday for a much stiffer term of up to 10 years. Meanwhile, new details emerged about his time behind bars.

May 12, 2013

The United Nations counter-terrorism panel dealing with Al-Qaida strengthened its work and cooperation with related UN bodies to more urgently address the evolving threats posed by the network in Mali, the Sahel and Somalia, the chairmen of the group today told the UN Security Council.

May 10, 2013

The High Court of Tanzania yesterday nullified three terrorism counts facing Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo defence and security director Wilfred Lwakatare and his co-accused, Ludovick Joseph for lack of evidence to prove that the meeting they held to purportedly commit terrorism was linked with the act.

May 22, 2013

During the election campaign, the militants of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and its affiliated groups who had accelerated their terror-activities to sabotage the elections 2013 in Pakistan failed in their nefarious designs as they did not want to see democracy to be flourished in the country. TTP which had accepted responsibly for terror-assaults on the election-sites, especially of ANP and MQM including some other political entities and office of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) through terror-devices had pledged to continue such attacks in future.

May 21, 2013

Perhaps a meal was not the ideal setting to talk about something as unappetizing as a hunger strike. But there was no way, even with lunch on the table, to avoid that grim topic with Karen J. Greenberg, who has made herself an expert on matters of torture, terrorism trials and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There, dozens of inmates are refusing food to protest their years of incarceration without trial. Instead, they are being force-fed through tubes inserted in the nose. The last thing their American captors want is for any of them to die — or die for lack of nutrition, anyway.

May 21, 2013

Every sphere of life within the US is being transformed by the post-911 momentum toward tyranny. One outrageous violation after another assaults our liberties and places ever-more unrestrained power in the hands of the government. Associated Press telephone conversations are illegally seized by the government; whistle blowers like Julian Assange or Barry Manning are considered enemies of the state; New York City police systematically stop and search citizens at random; nonviolent Occupy protestors are brutalized by police in nearly every city; the systematic violation of our right to privacy continues nationwide; and the entire city of Boston is locked down.

May 21, 2013

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wanted to create fear throughout the city of Boston. They wanted Boston communities to be afraid of going to work and afraid of going to school. They wanted people to be afraid of congregating. Following the Boston bombings, Tamerlan was shot dead. Younger brother Dzhokhar is recovering from several gunshot wounds. Killing four people, injuring dozens, and creating a media frenzied panic during their weeklong rampage, these two brothers were successful far beyond the actual bombing. There were enormous costs that this country endured during the Tsarnaev’s terrorism spree.

May 17, 2013

When it comes to civilian unrest and the likelihood of being injurred in a terrorist attack, the United States still ranks as one of the safest around, but not as safe as — believe it or not — Botswana.  Even Namibia is considered safer in terms of political risk, civilian unrest and acts of terrorism.  So says the latest political risk map by U.K. based Aon Plc, a risk management firm.

May 17, 2013

Terrorism always complicates diplomatic relations. Since the Boston Marathon bombing, the suspected handiwork of two brothers of Chechen background, Russian and American security officials have focused on a blame game. Could better cooperation between the FBI and the FSB (successor to the KGB) have averted this bombing? Which country is responsible for the carnage? The United States, which Russia warned in 2011 about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother who was killed in the police shootout a few days after the bombing? Or Moscow, which gave Washington scant evidence to pursue in that query?

May 14, 2013

The shooting of nineteen innocent people, including two children, at a Mother's Day celebration in New Orleans yesterday was an act of violence only gaudy enough to hold the nation's attention momentarily. Shortly after the bodies were cleared, the FBI said they "have no indication the shooting was an act of terrorism. 'It’s strictly an act of street violence in New Orleans.'" At that, we were free to let our attention drift. In America, all villainy is not created equal.